Peace Corps

At the age of 71, Stanley Mazaroff can look back on a rich life and can divide it into quarters. He was a pioneering Peace Corps volunteer, a successful law partner, an art student and now a published author for the second time. His book, "Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson: Collector and Connoisseur," published last month by the Johns Hopkins University Press, illuminates the often strained relationship between the Gilded Age collector and the art historian, an acknowledged expert on Italian Renaissance paintings.

The U.S. Peace Corps will begin accepting applications from same-sex couples who wish to serve overseas together for the first time next month, the agency announced Tuesday. The move follows a broader shift by the Obama administration toward publicly supporting gay rights and denouncing LGBT discrimination globally through U.S. diplomatic efforts, including at the State Department and the United Nations. The Peace Corps said opening its doors to same-sex domestic partners "further diversifies the pool of Peace Corps applicants and the skills of those invited to serve overseas in the fields of education, health, community economic development, environment, youth in development and agriculture.

Richard Gardiner stood out from most of the prospective applicants who stopped at the Peace Corps recruiting booth in the East Wing Lobby of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health yesterday.Most of the people visiting the booth were students in their 20s. Mr. Gardiner is a 50-year-old employee of the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. He said he did not feel out of place, however."I know far more than they do. At this stage in life, I have super confidence," he said.Peace Corps officials kicked off a recruiting drive in the Baltimore area yesterday morning by opening a recruiting booth at the Hopkins.

I found the recent headline regarding to Maryland National Guard ("Maryland Guard fights on in hope of Afghan peace," Jan. 29) to be Orwellian. It is a simple dictum that you can't wage war for peace. There are no winners in a war, only losers. One side may kill more than the other or capture more territory, but a cessation of warfare is not peace. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana helping to set up small business. It would have been ludicrous for me to use force on the entrepreneurs to get them to do what I wanted.

Loret Ruppe, 60, the longest-serving director of the Peace Corps in its 35-year history, died yesterday of ovarian cancer at her home in Bethesda.Appointed director of the Peace Corps by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she served eight years. She was credited by many with overseeing a revitalization of the international service organization. In 1989, she was appointed ambassador to Norway by President George Bush.She is survived by her husband, former U.S. Rep. Philip Edward Ruppe, a Michigan Republican; and five daughters.

Forty years ago, when Lillian Carter applied to the Peace Corps, the idea of a 67-year-old woman's volunteering to serve as a public health worker in India was so unusual, the sexagenarian had to have her head examined before being accepted. The Corps requested she undergo a psychiatric evaluation. The mother of President Jimmy Carter passed the assessment and went on to become one of the Peace Corps' most famous senior volunteers. After her death in 1983, the organization established an award in her name to recognize volunteers 50 and over for outstanding service.

Freda Irene Jones Himmelmann, who helped create training programs in the early days of the Peace Corps, died of respiratory failure Feb. 25 at the Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis. She was 78.Mrs. Himmelmann, who had lived in Maryland since 1976, devoted much of her life to fostering goodwill abroad, with the Peace Corps and the American Field Service.While living in Milwaukee in the early 1960s, she helped set up training programs for people entering the newly created Peace Corps.

WASHINGTON -- Several weeks ago, President Clinton made the kind of news he can do without by criticizing ultraconservative radio and television talk show host Rush Limbaugh and his ilk for "a constant, unremitting drumbeat of negativism and cynicism" that clearly had gotten under his skin. That night on television and in the next day's newspapers, Clinton's gripe overshadowed all else he had done that day.In the news and political business, it's called "stepping on your own story." The president aired his complaint in a phone interview from Air Force One as it flew to St. Louis, where he was headed to mark the beginning of a "Summer of Service" by 7,000 young volunteers in pilot projects of his new national service program.

A SENIOR at Goucher College, Sonia Peters wanted a challenge and found it. She will be heading for Mali, West Africa, next month with the Peace Corps."

ASK SUE GRIFFIN where she'll be spending the next two years, and she'll tell you Eastern Europe. Ask her why, and she'll tell you it was her destiny. "I think it chose me," Griffin, a Westminster resident, said of her decision last year to become a Peace Corps volunteer at age 59. "It was the right time of my life to enter into this phase." Since then, Griffin's life has been a sea of paperwork. She has filled out applications, set legal affairs in order, and undergone medical examinations to ensure she's healthy enough to serve in an underdeveloped area.

Robert W. "Bob" Roche, a former Peace Corps volunteer who later worked in Africa with Catholic Relief Services, died Jan. 12 of undetermined causes at Sanctuary at Holy Cross, a Burtonsville senior living community. The Columbia resident was 61. "We are awaiting the results of an autopsy as to the cause of death," said his son, Robert L. Roche, who lives in Washington. Robert Winslow "Bob" Roche was born and raised in Monroeville, Pa., where he graduated in 1968 from Gateway Senior High School.

Eugenia A. "Genie" Kennedy, a former Peace Corps volunteer and teacher, died Jan. 7 of multiple organ failure at her Bel Air home. She was 82. A daughter of a businessman and a homemaker, Sarah Eugenia Asbury, who did not use her first name, was born and raised in Delta, Pa. After graduating from Delta High School in 1947, she earned a bachelor's degree in business education in 1951 from Russell Sage College in upstate New York....

What if you get a message on Facebook from someone you knew many years ago — someone you haven't had any contact with in all that time? And what if you have no desire to connect with that person? What do you do? Those questions came up for me in the last few days. But I wasn't the person who received the Facebook message. I was the one who sent it. The man from my past I tried to connect with has a common name, but I had no doubt that I was sending the message to the right person.

Harry Thomas Walker Jr., a retired Howard County public school educator who had served in the Peace Corps during the 1960s, died Saturday of heart failure at the Heartlands senior community in Ellicott City. The Roland Park resident was 66. Dr. Walker, the son of librarians, was born in Champaign, Ill., and moved with his family to Columbia, S.C. In the mid-1950s, the family moved to Lochearn. He became an accomplished clarinetist and saxophonist, and while attending Milford Mill High School, played with the Del Vinos, a rock group.

The Peace Corps has endured a rough month. On Jan. 18, the Corps lost Sargent Shriver, its charismatic architect and first leader. The previous Friday, ABC News ran a grizzly story on violence against Peace Corps volunteers — Jess Smochek was gang-raped in Bangladesh in 2004; Kate Puzey was murdered in Benin in 2009. This raises the question: Has Mr. Shriver's Peace Corps become too dangerous for volunteers? There's no question that in male-dominated, developing countries, the Peace Corps experience is often more harrowing for women than men. Approximately 0.5 percent of female volunteers become rape victims in the Peace Corps (during the two-year service commitment)

"Sargent Shriver embodied the ideals we share as One Maryland — our belief in the dignity of every individual and in our own responsibility to advance the greater good. ... Sargent Shriver's overwhelming optimism and energy brightened our nation in its darkest times and served to defend the very ideals our country was built upon. " Gov. Martin O'Malley … "Sargent was a passionate advocate for peace, justice and fairness throughout our society and across our world.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate's success yesterday in ending the Republican filibuster against President Clinton's national service proposal gives him an important legislative victory at precisely the time he needs one. Although the bill that has already passed the House and is now headed for easy Senate approval is a scaled-down version of what Clinton advocated in the 1992 campaign and originally proposed, it retains the basic ingredients that made the idea...

Roma L. Klar, a former secretary who worked in the White House during the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and ended her career with the Peace Corps, died Friday of heart failure at Brightview Assisted-Living in Catonsville. She was 98. Roma Lee Simmers, the daughter of farmers, was born and raised in Nowata, Okla., where she graduated in 1928 from Copan High School. After graduating in 1930 from Chillicothe Business College in Chillicothe, Mo., Mrs. Klar moved to Washington and went to work as a secretary for the federal government.